Book picks similar to
Ninety 9 by Vanessa Berry


non-fiction
memoir
history
giramondo

Fearless: How Leicester City Shook the Premier League, and What it Means for Sport


Jonathan Northcroft - 2016
    Out on the pitch a lone brass player sounds the haunting Post Horn Gallop, for 80 years the home players' entrance tune. Spines tingle. Air is gulped into opposition lungs. Game time, time to begin the chase. Burning fox eyes peer down from between the decks of one of the stands. On the stadium's outside wall a royal blue LCD display says #Fearless.Welcome to Leicester City. They were always a club with a difference but in 2015-16 they created a story that in modern football stands unique. Who could believe it: from relegation certainties to champions of England? It was when, on behalf of every small club, dreams were hunted at the King Power, a season where the impossible became merely quarry.5,000-1 shots when the campaign started, Leicester's transformation has been remarkable. This is the most incredible cast of written-offs, grafters, misfits and journeymen, coming together in a special time and place to simultaneously have the season of their lives. Fearless will document Leicester's hunt of their impossible dream. It will tell the greatest football tale of the Premier League era, in loving detail, with the inside track. Now that Leicester have gone all the way and won the title, it is the best story in world sports - for years.Premier League champions. The side who'd been adrift at the bottom 12 months previously, who's started the season as relegation favourites, whose manager was favourite to be the first one sacked once the campaign got underway. A League One side only seven seasons previously. A squad of �500,000 and �1m men. Leicester. Ridiculous. Miraculous. Fearless.

Remembering Diana: A Life in Photographs


National Geographic Society - 2017
    Page after page of inside photos from the legendary National Geographic archives document the royal's most memorable moments in the spotlight; a luminous, personal remembrance by Diana friend and biographer Tina Brown adds context and nuance to a poignant life twenty years after her tragic death. Float down memory lane through more than 100 remarkable images of Diana, from her days as a schoolgirl to her engagement to Prince Charles, the birth of Princes William and Harry, and her life in the media as an outspoken advocate for the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden. This elegant book features reflections from those who knew her best, recollections from dignitaries and celebrities like Nelson Mandela and Elton John, and personal insight through the princess's own words. This richly illustrated book is a beautiful ode to one of the world's most beloved women.

Working Class Boy


Jimmy Barnes - 2016
    But long before Cold Chisel and 'Barnesy', long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock'n'roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes. It is a memoir burning with the frustration and frenetic energy of teenage sex, drugs, violence and ambition for more than what you have.Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny, Jimmy Barnes's childhood memoir is at once the story of migrant dreams fulfilled and dashed. After arriving in Australia in the summer of 1962, things went from bad to worse for the Swan family - Dot, Jim and their six kids. The scramble to manage in the tough northern suburbs of Adelaide in the 60s would take its toll on the Swans as dwindling money, too much alcohol and fraying tempers gave way to violence and despair. This is the story of a family's collapse, but also of a young boy's dream to escape the misery of the suburbs with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a rock'n'roll band and get out of town for good.

Me of the Never Never


Fiona O'Loughlin - 2011
    Fiona has also had successful shows at the Edinburgh and Adelaide fringe festivals, the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal and the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.This book contains her stories - funny and sometimes sad stories about her upbringing as part of a large Irish-Catholic family on a wheat farm in South Australia, her chaotic and disorganised family life ever since, living in Alice Springs and making it as a stand-up comedian. She also talks of a darker side of the life of many performers - alcohol.This book is for anyone who likes to laugh (and cry), who wants to read about a woman living her life on her terms.

The Rifle: Combat Stories from America's Last WWII Veterans, Told Through an M1 Garand


Andrew Biggio - 2021
    Marine, Andrew Biggio, who returned home from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, full of questions about the price of war. He found answers from those who survived the costliest war of all -- WWII veterans. It began when Biggio bought a 1945 M1 Garand Rifle, the most common rifle used in WWII, to honor his great uncle, a U.S. Army soldier who died on the hills of the Italian countryside. When Biggio showed the gun to his neighbor, WWII veteran Corporal Joseph Drago, it unlocked memories Drago had kept unspoken for 50 years.  On the spur of the moment, Biggio asked Drago to sign the rifle. Thus began this Marine’s mission to find as many WWII veterans as he could, get their signatures on the rifle, and document their stories. For two years, Biggio traveled across the country to interview America’s last-living WWII veterans.  Each time he put the M1 Garand Rifle in their hands, their eyes lit up with memories triggered by holding the weapon that had been with them every step of the war. With each visit and every story told to Biggio, the veterans signed their names to the rifle. 96 signatures now cover that rifle, each a reminder of the price of war and the courage of our soldiers.

Freedom: Credos from the Road


Ralph Barger - 2005
    He is patriotic—a veteran who loves his country. He is independent—choosing his own path on his motorcycle, living life on his own terms. He is outspoken—he has boldly criticized injustices in American law and society despite the backlash this has evoked from the establishment. Yet the element that he finds most important, most sacred, most American, is freedom.In Freedom, Sonny articulates many of the principles he employs in his own life. Whether he is regarded as a leader, a rebel, a revolutionary, a criminal, or a soldier, Sonny's outlook has been influenced not just by school but by the military, prison, and his experiences riding with the world's most notorious motorcycle club. It was on these various journeys that he learned the lessons that are most important in his life and the qualities he respects when he sees them in others:IndependenceCustomize Yourself; Originals Don't Come Off an Assembly LineToughnessTemper the Steel to Forge a Strong BladeFairness Treat Me Good, I'll Treat You Better; Treat Me Bad, I'll Treat You WorsePresented in the form of fifty credos, this book gives Sonny Barger's perspective on how to live a life that embodies the most fundamental of American virtues: freedom.

Dark Emu


Bruce Pascoe - 2014
    The evidence insists that Aboriginal people right across the continent were using domesticated plants, sowing, harvesting, irrigating and storing – behaviours inconsistent with the hunter-gatherer tag. Gerritsen and Gammage in their latest books support this premise but Pascoe takes this further and challenges the hunter-gatherer tag as a convenient lie. Almost all the evidence comes from the records and diaries of the Australian explorers, impeccable sources.

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble


Dan Lyons - 2016
    His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong? HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."Mixed in with Lyons's uproarious tale of his rise and fall at Hubspot is a trenchant analysis of the start-up world, a de facto conspiracy between those who start companies and those who fund them, a world where bad ideas are rewarded with hefty investments, where companies blow money lavishing perks on their post-collegiate workforces, and where everybody is trying to hang on just long enough to reach an IPO and cash out. With a cast of characters that includes devilish angel investors, fad-chasing venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and "wantrapreneurs," bloggers and brogrammers, social climbers and sociopaths, Disrupted is a gripping and definitive account of life in the (second) tech bubble.

Shy: A Memoir


Sian Prior - 2014
    Only three letters long, and it begins with an exhortation to silence. Shhh. There’s no authority in it, no control. It’s a blushing, hunching word; a nervous, knock-kneed, wallflower word. A word for children, not grown-ups, because surely grown-ups grow out of shyness. Don’t they?SIAN PRIOR has maintained a career in the public eye for more than twenty years. For far longer than that she has suffered from excruciating shyness, only partly alleviated by the security she finds with her famous partner Tom. Eventually, after bolting from a party in a state of near-panic, she decides to learn about the science of social anxiety. But soon other questions intrude. About grief, intimacy, self-perception and fear; loss and longing and the consequences of love.Then Tom says he is leaving.Frank, provocative, remarkable in its clarity and beautifully written—Shy is a book you will be thinking and talking about long after you read the final page.

The Lotus Eaters: A memoir


Emily Clements - 2020
    With seemingly nothing to lose, she makes the biggest decision of her life – to stay. But Emily's attempts to bridge a yawning loneliness spur a downward spiral of recklessness, as she hurtles from one sexual encounter to the next. It will take a truly terrifying experience for her to understand that sex is both a weapon and a wound in her battle for self-worth and empowerment.Delicately interweaving past and present, The Lotus Eaters is a sharply written story of self-redemption from an exciting young voice in Australian memoir that dissects the patterns of blame and shame women can form around their bodies and relationships.

Greetings from Myanmar


David Bockino - 2016
    Traversing the country, he encounters a pompous Western businessman swindling his way to millions, a local vendor with a flair for painting nudes, and long ago legends of a western circus. Sensitively written and expertly researched, Greetings from Myanmar: Exploring the Price of Progress in One of the Last Countries on Earth to Open for Business is the story of a flourishing nation still very much in limbo and an answer to the hard questions that arise when tourism not only charts, but shapes a place as well.